Just saw this on the news tonight, scary landing. I’ve had a few like this over the years. Back in the early nineties I was flying 2 or three times a week between cities and I remember a Dan Air flight landing at Heathrow from Amsterdam in dirty weather bouncing around everywhere and finally touching down with great relief when suddenly the engines (which I was sitting right next to) span up really fast and we went near vertical and left with lockers spilling their guts and everyone screaming. After a short time the captain came on the radio to say we had a near miss with an Iberia jet that had missed its exit point and stopped on the runway… I also remember flying on the day of the ‘87 storms and my flight from Aberdeen having to make three atempts to land at Birmingham although not as traumatic (turboprop).
Filed under: General, Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 8:25 pm
I never quite got into FaceBook, I see the benefits of FaceBook, MySpace etc but I feel they are not secure enough, I was getting spammed with too many people trying to be my friend and I didn’t like it, so I decided to leave. I saw too many trawling exploits too…
Also the number of apps was becoming overwhelming and keeping up with it was almost a full time job. I still use LinkedIn as my ‘professional FaceBook’ but until I can overcome my fears of FaceBook trawling, I’ll stay offline.
I heard about these a while ago via American Express and their Traveller card which they just withdrew last year. Basically the concept is its a credit card with no credit, just whatever money you top up directly on to it, typically between £50-£5000. Its a bit like cash, and I guess similar to the EMV initiative and the Oyster card payment scheme. The upside is you can’t lose more than the topped up balance as there is no credit capability so in theory using it on the internet make sense. The downside is that you pay a percentage to top up and per transaction. You can have one from 10 years old so they can be used by kids and topped up by parents.
Last night we went to the O2 arena to see the Spice Girls reunion tour. If you haven’t been to the arena before then you are missing a great venue full of restaurants and entertainments. Its what an evening entertainment should be, relaxed and plenty of space. We were lucky enough to be on level 1 in the VIP area right by the runway at head height. We had some tv stars and footballers round about us, I had Stacey from EastEnders in the seat in front of me. Shortly before the start David Beckham came in and went down to the front of the runway to rapturous applause. Right on que at 20:30 the Spice Girls burst onto the stage. They did all their hits, both as a group and individually and they went straight through to 22:30. It was a non stop rollercoaster of hits and very enjoyable, my favourite being ‘Who do you think you are’ leading onto a solo runway fashion show parody by Posh on her own. I have to say it was a great night and worth every penny, who cares if they are doing it for the money! Every seat in the arena was filled, no gaps anywhere. I must say I would not want to sit up at the top tier (4) as I think I would have vertigo its so high and steep. Posh definitely got the biggest cheers every time she sang and I would say she was the crowds favourite. Anyway, it was a great night out!
As many of you know I was unimpressed by the poor fit of the battery cover for my Dopod C730 (Cavalier). Last week I ordered a 2250ma battery for my T-Mobile Mail, but unfortunately I received a battery for a C730. So I tried fitting it to my C730 as it included a new back to house the huge battery. Surprise, surprise this new (although hideously ugly) battery cover fits properly, Hooray!
Now I just need a trolley to carry it round with me, and I dare not shows its ugly hump in public.
Filed under: General, Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 8:51 pm
I’m not a huge downloader of stuff from the internet but I do have a large and ever growing collection of digital photo’s which are getting ever larger individually because of increasing resolutions. Right now I probably have about 200GB of irreplaceable photos in digital format from holidays, family events etc. Looking back 10 years I’d qualify to be running a corporate datacenter with that much data, and I’d probably have a sophisticated tape backup system with robotic autoloader, offsite storage etc. That’s not likely to happen at my house, but in reality my personal requirements probably aren’t that much different to a datacenter in so far as I don’t want to lose that data and not be able to reliably and rapidly recover it somehow.
Yet today with the advent of £99 750GB external drives, how do we backup that precious data, indeed do we back it up? I run my home server with a 4 drive RAID-5 array and so have some protection from disk failures, yet I have had two separate disk failures in the past 2 years. If I didn’t have RAID-5 I’d have lost quite a lot of irreplaceable data. Even so, I am still at risk from destruction, fire of theft all of which would lose my data. As it happens I do keep a separate backup of the critical bits, but that’s at home too. Another factor is that backing up large data sets actually takes a lot of real time whether that’s to Blu-Ray media or even another hard disk.
Now I know people who have vastly larger collections of data than me, boosted by music and movie content which takes up more and more capacity. So now, even a spare 750GB drive isn’t enough as a backup and is potentially still exposed to the same disaster as the main data.
For me, I have taken to uploading my photos to Flickr so that I have a permanent backup, or do I? Actually Flickr make no guarantees that my photos are safe and their T&C’s state that as well. Its a good backup option though, as its unlikely to fail simultaneously (unless the world ends).
Unfortunately, until there is infinite bandwidth and unlimited storage to allow everything to exist in your own virtual datacenter on the web, many heavy users really do need to think about getting a disaster recovery plan in place for when they lose data, rather than if.
Filed under: General, Tech — tim CARMICHAEL @ 12:03 am
In our personal detail aware world, ask.com have just trumped Google by offering an option to delete search data and anything that would link you to it. Today, Google will retain data on searches you make for 18 months. That isn’t something you might want them to do, not because you search for anything illegal, but because someone else might use your browser or just use your data to direct market to you. There’s no reason why you should let Google take advantage of you like this other than you have no choice if you want to use their engine.
Well ASK changes that today with their ASK Eraser option which once switched on (look top right of their page) will not store any data about your searches which is really what Google et al should do too. Actually ASK is quite good overall with neat enhancements like page preview thumbnails before you go to a page and they seem to have shaken off the Jeeves moniker now too.
I was quite surprised, but pleased, to see Channel 4 HD appear on channel 140 tonight. Channel 4 HD is just a straight replica of the regular Channel 4 content which means if the source is not HD then it will show in SD, but that’s ok. Its a better approach than the BBC HD and forthcoming ITV1 HD channels where they merge bits from all channels and not necessarily at the same time as the SD channel. Even though the BBC HD channel is now fully launched as well, I don’t think they make the most of the capacity and don’t operate all day despite having sufficient content. The only downside is that there is no Channel 4 HD +1 which would have been nice. Its looking unlikely that there are going to be many more new channels on Sky as they are running low on capacity until new satellites are added, so Channel 4 HD +1 may be some way off, but lets hope not!
However, in the spring FreeSat will lauch with Free To Air delivery for ITV and BBC channels including HD. You can use your existing dish but you need a new receiver see here
Filed under: General, Travel — tim CARMICHAEL @ 11:00 pm
Rather unbelievably this brand new Airbus A-340 was written off within metres of leaving the factory by accidentally hitting a wall. I’d like to see the insurance claim form …
Filed under: Cars, General — tim CARMICHAEL @ 6:00 pm
I’ve always wanted a Land Rover Lightweight Air Portable ever since I first saw one as a lad. Today I collected it! Its a bog standard 2.25 petrol model with a hardtop in NATO matt green. Designed to be carried in Hercules transport aircraft and dropped by parachute it is, as its name suggests, lightweight with an aluminium body and all the upper body can be removed, great for the summer. Driving it back round the M25 was an experience! My first action was to brim up the fuel tanks (it has two) one under each front seat, so you have to remove the sea cover and lift the protective cover before opening the tank which you can then just watch filling up…
Driving is a whole other experience, because the fuel tank is under the seat the seat is not adjustable in anyway and was apparently designed for someone considerably shorter than me so I find myself sitting very close to the wheel … which is the same as fitted to the QE2 having a full 6 inch play before the nobbly wheels actually move in any direction. I quickly learned that making a manoeuvre requires advance planning. The LWAP only has 4 forward gears, spaced about 6 inches apart, which leads to much searching and crunching although I am mastering it better now but its still too easy to ride the clutch. Its slightly (very) noisy, which is great if you are outside as it sounds very military, but renders the occupants profoundly deaf. Also it doesn’t go very fast, so I won’t rack up any speeding points, and since the seat belts appear to be made from body webbing that’s just as well.
Aside from the 1960’s ergonomics, its great fun! I can’t wait for summer.
The lamentable, if not unexpected breach of data protection by HMRC todaay raises different issues for me than the headline grabbing loss reported by the media. For me the issue is how any one single person is allowed to download data on to CD without multiple signoffs. In my opinion there is no way this kind of data, let alone the quantity should be just downloadable by any member of staff below a very serious rank, and even then only with sign off by one or more other independent data guardians thereby re-inforcing the seriousness with which this data should be handled.
Really the government should use this disaster as a way to really shake up data protection mechanisms re-inforced by law. I also believe that this data, wherever held, is my possesion and not someone elses to give away. Sepcifically I believe that this data should not be aggregated in this way either by government or other third parties. If you take out any of the services from experian, equifax etc to look at your credit profile online you will see that these ‘aggregations’ have all sorts of data including credit limits, balances and payment history. This should just not be available in this format, its a recipe for disaster. The government should enable all citizens, especially those who really care to be the custodian of their data and not an unaccountable third party.
I’m sure the government won’t do anything as helpful as this, and I fully expect another damaging leak to happen not far down the road because personal data is just not being protected properly.
How many times have I wished for something like this ? Something so simple to stop my big fat fingers from dropiing tiny components in unaccessible places! Such a good idea, now I just need to find out where to buy it in the UK.
The BBC have published a list of ludicrous laws here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7081038.stm which I casually perused today. My two personal favourites from the top ten are;
In third place, with 6%, a law stating that It is illegal for a woman to be topless in Liverpool except as a clerk in a tropical fish store…
In tenth, It is legal to murder a Scotsman within the ancient city walls of York, but only if he is carrying a bow and arrow (2%).
Internationally I was tickled by the notion that In Florida, it is a jailable offence for unmarried women who parachute on a Sunday (6%).
Reported on SiliconValley.com, this guy feels vibrations in his leg near where his phone normally is kept, even if his phone is not there, like a phantom vibration. Freakily, I have experienced this a couple of times as well! Several times I have thought my phone was ringing (vibrating) I’ve put my hand in my pocket and found no phone…. not often, but enough that I could recognise this straight away. Should I worry?
I just got a new laptop for Vic which came pre-loaded with Vista Home premium. Vic knows as much about computers as I know about drama, but it only took her two hours to ask if she could have XP back like her old laptop… Its a real shame that Vista has turned out the way it has as a visually attratctive but slow and overweight version of XP in drag.
I asked Vic to persist with Vista for a while and give it a chance … but the final straw came when she tried to copy her photos off her usb key … can you see why ?
I had to agree that it would be somewhat unreasonable to wait nearly 24 years for the copy to complete. This put the 6 days the DVD burn dialog told me into perspective!
We went up to the village this afternoon to watch the Tour De France come through. From the time we arrived, it took about 2 hours before the riders appeared. In that time no-end of ‘procession’ cars, vans and trucks came through at high speeds. No end of french police bikes and in cars as well as more brit bike police than I imagined were in the whole country. In fact I’m sure that if you laid out all the vehicles and bikes end to end for the whole procession, the actual riders would be only 1-2%. The riders came and went in about 3 minutes first to last, when they did arrive it was mayhem, everyone traveling at 30+mph consuming the whole road space, anyone stepping out would have been killed outright.
Filed under: General, Travel — tim CARMICHAEL @ 5:36 pm
These are all interesting possible alternatives for the BA acronym (British Airways) who are in appalling state from a customer perspective. in the last 10 days I have spent £30 in phone charges on their money making 0870 number waiting to get through to their sales/customer service line. One call was 55 minutes on hold before I got a representative who said they didn’t have enough staff. You cant even complain because there is no-one to complain to except the reps who agree. How can i be angry at them? To add insult to injury, we, the consumer have to fund the call time in order to use their service. And even worse customer service and sales and enquiries are all on the same number. They only keep their lines open until 20:00 so you can’t even ring in at a quieter time. It could seem to someone uncharitable that the might make more money from the 0870 number than from the fare… I certainly hope they sort things out, but since there’s no-one to complain to there’s no way to even be sure they know there is a problem.
Come on BA, sort it out!
Update: I managed to get through by contacting the web support team on +44 8708508504 who put me straight though to a rep. By then my bookings had all expired so I had to do them again, and I had to bite my tongue when asked why I had let them expire. Hope that numbers helps someone else.
Vicki bought me an electric fly swatter and despite it only being powered by 2 x AA batteries it works really well. Catching an annoying fly with a quick swipe results in a satisfying crack and a small spark. Best for those small flys that continuously orbit your light as catching a cluster fly is a bit to random and you can easily spend 2-3 minutes chasing just one fly. The swatter looks like a small tennis racket with a wire mesh instead of strings. The mesh lets through small insects including mosquitoes, unfortunately. The mesh is not live unless you press a conveniently situated button on the handle, and the voltage is too small to be noticeable to the touch.
Anyway, very good tool.
Update: Although its only 3 volts the mesh managed to give me a heck of a bolt that I could feel for an hour afterwards as a burning sensation up my arm. Now I know why the flies catch fire. You have been warned! don’t touch the mesh.
Well its been raining all week, I missed all the action but getting back last night it was actually sunny (and my Dopod C730 had arrived) but today its back to the rain these are some views looking out from my house onto a watery world …
